Stereo

The room that made Montréal an afterhours city. No last call, a sound system people fly in for, and a booking policy that has kept house and techno honest here since 1998.

Address

858 Sainte-Catherine Street East, Montreal, QC H2L 2E3

Capacity

1000

The sound

Techno, tech house, house, progressive, minimal

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ONCE UPON A TIME · 02

Nineteen thousand watts, no limiter

Angel Moraes opened this room in 1998 on the Paradise Garage model: the sound system is the point, and everything else arranges itself around it. Two arsons and two sound systems later, that is still the deal. We wrote the whole history down — including the part nobody prints: the system in there now was custom-built by the man who owns the place.

Read the story

1998Moraes opens 858 Sainte-Catherine Est. Three-foot walls, a dancefloor on shock absorbers.
2003–08Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu’s build: six fourteen-foot stacks, 19,000 watts, not a limiter in it.
2008Fire guts the venue. Those stacks don’t come back.
2009 –Tommy Piscardelli reopens with a system he custom-built himself, and has been rebuilding ever since.